Great Movies Don’t Always Need Movie Stars
Do good movies require movie stars? I was thinking about this over the weekend after seeing Alien: Romulus, which topped the box office, earning $108 million globally in its opening weekend. I was also thinking about an article that I wrote a while back, “Quentin Tarantino: Was He Right? And Do We Really Need Movie Stars?”
Of course, Tarantino is probably more movie star-obsessed than most, recently complaining that George Clooney isn’t a “movie star” anymore. And this annoyed Clooney. We’ll leave them to fight about it. But do movie stars matter anymore?
20th Century Films
The star of Alien: Romulus is Cailee Spaeny, who plays Rain. Spaeny recently portrayed Priscella Presley in last year’s Priscella; she’s also had roles in 2018’s Pacific Rim Uprising, 2018’s Vice, 2018’s On The Basis of Sex and the 2021 miniseries Mare of Easttown. To be clear, she’s a great actor with a lot of range. But per Quentin’s complaints, she’s hardly a famous name or a “movie star.”
20th Century Films
David Jonsson plays Andy, an android who is like a brother to Rain. He’s a British stage actor who you may not have heard of. He was fantastic, and if I were a director, I’d figure out how I could cast him. But he’s not a “movie star” either. At least, not yet.
The cast also includes Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu. The closest we get to a movie star is Ian Holm. Holm played the android Ash in the franchise’s original film, 1979’s Alien. And although Holm died in 2020, his likeness is used for another android called Rook. Holm is credited with “facial and vocal reference,” according to the Internet Movie Database.
The lack of star power hasn’t hurt Alien: Romulus. Tarantino might quip that, as with superhero films, audiences are going because of the love of the franchise. Romulus is the ninth film in the Alien series (including two crossovers with the Predator films). But not all of those films have been huge commercial successes: 1992’s Alien3 was considered a flop in the U.S. 1997’s Alien: Resurrection nearly ended the franchise, with 20th Century Fox opting to do the Predator crossovers and ditched the Resurrection storyline.
Alien: Romulus currently has an 82% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, along with an 86% audience score. There was a good buzz around the film. It wasn’t just that it was an Alien film: people believed that it was an Alien film worth their time and money. I would compare it, in some ways, to the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One. Alien: Romulus takes place between 1979’s Alien and the sequel, 1986’s Aliens. It doesn’t share any characters but references the overall series and even adds to the lore. And, importantly, like Rogue One, it can be enjoyed without having much prior knowledge about the entire series. It’s very difficult to generate buzz around a film that you need to do homework to appreciate.
Rotten Tomatoes’ 86% audience score indicates that not everyone liked it, but I can’t imagine anyone leaving the theater complaining that the movie needed more star power. The actors played their roles well, particularly Jonsson. The only thing big stars would have added to the film would have been a higher budget.
Seeing big movie stars on the big screen can be fun, of course. This is particularly true in Quentin Tarantino’s movies. When you watch his films, you can feel his joy in casting John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Brad Pitt, Lucy Liu, Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, and Walton Goggins, just to name a few. You know he had a blast bringing Christoph Waltz to a larger audience. And you can sense how thrilled he was to cast Don Johnson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Pam Grier, and Robert Forster in big movies. I’ve often wondered if some of his castings are just based on his desire to meet some of his favorites and spend time with them. They might be: but they always work.
Forty-five years ago, Alien took theaters by storm. Coming just a year after Star Wars, it offered a much grittier view of space. Spaceships were darker and dirtier, takeoffs and landings felt stressful, and the world was much more complex. It wasn’t just about good and evil: in Alien, we learned that androids weren’t always our friends. More alarmingly, neither were corporations, who saw humans as expendable.
But the story – which was ahead of its time and holds up frighteningly well today – resonated, as did the tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” The cast boasted some well-known actors, including Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ian Holm, but it really balanced on the performance of a virtually unknown actor playing the main character, Ripley. Most would agree that Sigourney Weaver more than met the moment, becoming an instantly iconic actress. Apparently, Meryl Streep was also considered for the part: at the time, she was riding high from her breakout role in 1978’s The Deer Hunter.
Ms. Streep surely would have been great in the role of Ripley. But would she have been better than Weaver? More importantly, do you think anyone left the theater in 1979 complaining about the lack of a “movie star” in the lead role? Unlikely. In fact, they probably knew that they had just seen a star-making performance that anchored an incredible film, and in the end, it’s really about the film. And that’s what we really need: more good stories, not vehicles to pay rich people even more money.
